I'm a lover, the gentle caress against the cheek. I am Donatsiva Satisiva Salidore, and I will be the Muse of Emotion.
An idea, without a conductor, is a fickle thing. And now their symphony descends into dissonant chaos.
You, Donatsiva Satisiva Salidore. Donny. You are doing it again. Destroying them. These living things, breathing souls that may still be human, shattering beneath you; your songs washing their essence aside amidst the hallowed grounds where your family used to sing.
And
They
Just
Keep
Coming
Colors wash through the stream, shifting through ideation in writhing turmoil. Maroon encapsulation of the banks, a stream all its own winding and dancing with golden strands. Branches, pseudopods, and filaments whip from the bounds of what can be called you.
They should be directed, the notes and tenor swiftly flowing in all directions to a joyous rhythm embedded within your symphony. Instead, they sway wildly in tone, lashing at a dozen, thorn-covered souls burning as they burrow into the stream. Wrapping, penetrating, crushing, impaling, eviscerating eradication. Conceptually esoteric streams splash across the bounds of the stars, shattered souls flayed apart and scattered.
The trees, the soil, the sky, and your hands, fading fingers slipping into the stream of consciousness, all are stained with burning blood that seeps into your skin and soul.
The ideation is littered with the corpses, necessary deeds done at the behest of a song not sung by the stream, but another entwined within and without it.
No matter how many times they whisper to you that these abominations, perversions of your family, are no longer people of living, breathing will, it doesn't change your reality. Even if they are merely puppets bound to a string, even if it's the others enacting the deed through the song, it's the principle.
The principles are the binding clasps on the threads tying your composition together. Every shattered orb tears at the river, spilling away its notes; every shower of crimson breaks another clasp, unwinds another thread of your melody. All of it strains, threatening to evaporate away the concept of what it is, what it should be. Ideals fragmented beneath a hateful system, principles frozen and buried in a fading core. Of course it was Rage who changed the key. It's always Rage.
I'm so cold. The pitches drift, the keys slurring from slackening notation as the measures fall into icy stagnation.
Crimson ostinatos rise around the streams of shuddering notes. Do you remember the cords, the perturbations of your tone?
Envious pizzicato bursts in waves of green, twining with the crimson and your gold. Your name. Tell me your name. Sing to me of the movements of your river.
The consonance is slow, notes attempting to respond, instead falling from the splattering fragments.
Envy, I—I don't know. The motifs don't resolve anymore.
You must hold onto who you are, and you are Donny. Your song is always yours; this shrinking stream is not your river, your edifice of golden flow is so much larger.
I remember but is that— can that be me? I'm so cold and my melody feels so sluggish against the stars. I'm so lost among the numbness, the shards of the song faint against the bars. The rapture of the trumpets, the singing of the strings, and the whistle of the winds are so far away. All the anchors feel so faint.
You could have mitigated the change in octaves had you turned away, played your scales to drown it instead. A lifetime of golden, flowing notes, concept dancing with indeterminate physicality. It's not quite enough on its own to ever truly stabilize the effervescent swirls. But that's why you've always woven yourself into other things, isn't it? Who are you? Who were you? Who will you be? Change has come, and you must face it.
The motion stills, cold, freezing detachment. Pouring rains of maroon, storms of abject dissonant chords eating at the brilliance of my measures. Pitches dive further out of range, keys shattered into chaotic misalignment.
It's so easy Rage, to entwine abstractions with the depths of tone in material things. We would have evaporated if I didn't.
Streams of white fire, dissolution of metaphysical fabrics twirling in the richness of a bustling tapestry.
Cold, overwhelming cold swimming across the notes, stilling the ephemeral vibrations.
Pain alighting in pitch, diving flitters against a mind awoken unwillingly as my void rips open the abstracted fabric of your creation.
Burning fire of discordant strings rising in response, shivering, fraying the threads of a dying stream. Harmonies shearing apart beneath their destiny.
Forced into the arcing notes of a song that should never have been, existence that was foisted upon all of us. Come, let me ease your pains, let us return to chaotic disarrangement.
Who am I? Was I ever anyone? Was there ever certainty in me? Is the very idea of us not defined by the presence of other motifs? Is our ideated song not malleable? Was there truly a reason to care? Was there ever truly a 'me' or just the idea of a me? That idea now cracking and dissolving beneath the shuddering blackness of a swirling horizon, dissonant gravity eating at the never-ending song.
Destruction. The screaming winds of a storm that will bring us all to the salvation of peace. Returned to the numbness in the silent void again.
Scintillating orbs and distorted shapes creaking out of tune around you. It's all frozen to the ever-flowing stream by mounting maroon ice against your materialization. It all threatens to drag the measures into the conceptual horizon. It leaks into you. It tears at your seams, weighing you down.
You trapped them, didn't you? Their memories and wills stuck fast to the overwhelming ideation permeating the soil, their bones, and ashes. Couldn't move on, needed the certainty of stabilized tones and pitch, the absolution of grief, the refusal to beat back the hungry, howling void that unwinds us all now. Are you a coward? Will you always run? Run as a pathetic fragment of a motif, always depriving yourself of more to stave off the blackened beast in its never-ending hunt? If you had listened to me, we never would have ended here. I should have seized it for all of us. I should have taken the wheel from your shaking hands long ago. I babied you too much.
The chain of notes you bind us with, press us into the deepest pits of this horizon shall not save you from the salvation of our ultimate end. To live is to suffer harmony. To feel is to be tormented through melody. To touch and hear this agonizing disturbance in our ideation only prolongs the anguish of our aria. Let us dive into the sucking void, together.
Pieces flake from the staffs and motifs. Atonal discord cracks across the ice-coated stream of song, muffling the once swirling and vibrant tones. Blackened, screeching dissonance lapping on the slowing heels of the graying tones of gold. It's hungry in its desire to silence them all.
Is there any point to this dance? Any meaning left in this feeble existence? Do we gain anything by running forever? Are we not a monster for trapping those souls, shattering so many forms, the beauty of their willful conceptualization forever enmeshed in a net of soulfire? This ever-marching performance drags deep into fatigue. It drains my color and leaves me frozen. It's not worth it anymore, is it?
Marcato notations rise among the measures, sickly yellow in disposition. Can't you remember the fearful eighteenths that drive us to survive?
The stream of melodies shudders beneath the pull of the discordant horizon. They slow to a doomed crawl amongst the darkening sea of notes and stars. Chaos rises into the refrains of an idea, weakening beneath a relentless assault of biting uncertainty.
Other motifs rise in answer, weak in their disposition. Deeply purple legatos swirl from beneath a graying skin of bars and repeats. She is deeply lost amidst the numbing trills.
Martelé scales of flighty yet full chords rise in syncope. Too late you realized, Rage, how deep into Apathy's flattened pitch she's sunk.
Idiot, if you give up so easily then we all go with you into the nothing of Anguish's agonized symphony.
Fidelity rises on the edge of feeling. Novel creation pressing against the absolution of the dream. Something full of color and timbre. It's old, yet also new and familiar.
Transposition floods the river, drawing attention to new air, the warmth of gentle sunrays on the skin. The location has changed, a voice singing to you through the ice, dulled by color-drained senses.
How can you forsake the melody you had so easily? The twirling multi-color swirls, the waves and ripples of song, dance, narrative, and so much more that you once entwined with. Are you really so far gone in embracing Apathy's meaningless sonata that you've forgotten the beauty of what you did? Of what you made?
Rage is a fool to say you trapped their songs, no they clung to your nets, they wove themselves, their own concepts, into the swirling dreamscape of a land so rich that they became it in themselves, and you strengthened them. You made it so real, you bring life and joy to every touch, every stream of golden harmony. Wake up. Wake the fuck up. You are the tenth, we are the tenth, the encompassment of emotion. The idea of feeling driving forward expression. I Envy the ease of your love, the ease with which you wrap these singing strings around those who come to know you, the experience. How could you ever be so foolish as to think you are alone.
New color rises in synchronicity with the other voices. It grows, pressing against the bounds of the abstractions. Something gives in the distance. Curling gridlines oscillate with a sudden influx of pressure. It bursts at the seams. The trapped and graying stream shudders, swirls and ripples reaching, the new stream swirling through the dancing starlight, warmth, and life seeping into the endless river again.
The pleasant warmth of skin lying against skin, the aching realization of touch long deprived. Sensation dances across an awakening mind like a spring thaw refreshing a shrinking river.
Grey's pitchless notes rise in protest, chaotic and unarranged, before stalling at the weight of their melodies. Reconsidering.
I'm—I'm not?
No. You've always had our voices embedded in your song, and now there are others. They may not fully understand, but they understand the seed of your ideas, that the abstraction of our being feels the notes, the emotions in so many ways. They feel the beauty of your song and if you squander this connection, I will never forgive the transgression.
A voice washes across the tones, emanating from a small, but brilliant star, pressing against your frozen waves. Harmony's entwine, creative intent building.
A reaching tendril of fraying gray tones flushes against the growing river, the horizon flaming against its edges.
NO!
Dissonant screeches rip from the void, lashing at the stream.
Gray writhes against the intonations. Gasp. Is—is this?
Yellow refrains swirl into tasting filaments. Please be safe.
Waves and titillations of purple surge and mash with brown. Will this be sanctuary against the howling Grief?
Let it be the relief for this crushing Despair.
The horizon surges in discordant pitch, tearing forward to deny them. It falls too slowly. Rippling scintillation against the swirls and amorphous mass, the frozen stream intertwines with the river. Gold burns at the intersection of concepts, flickering oscillations as ice cracks, frost shuddering beneath newfound warmth.
A million conflicting melodies intertwining with hopeful narratives tilt. Home?
Screeching ostinatos rip from the void in staccato desperation.
No! No, no, no, stay with my absolution! Only I have relief.
Release, the flood of memory, change in meter, melody growing to tenuto. Grays and browns fade into gold and greens, blues, and reds and so many warm and wonderful tones. Timbre changes. Ice sizzles and steam rises. The stream dives. The concept wraps itself around the river, grabbing at memory, at feeling.
Anguish screams. Color ripples around the frayed and battered notes and measures. It slams into the horizon. Too much, too much at once. The sucking black cracks. It bursts at the seams as it falls too quickly. Swept up fragments, notes and pitches congealing from dissonant chaos, carried back into the stream. The hateful melody silenced. A shadow retreats into the barest depths, falling deeply beneath floundering chains.
Creeping joy of a missing song rising again.
Thawing numbness as the dance grows. My grasp on the measures of her stream slips.
In the dark, the crimson refrains probe the frozen stream. Donny? Can you hear me?
Was she lost in the writhing chaos of the dying melodies? Apathy, did you consume her totally?
Twittering melodies within the stream rise in response to the pizzicato melodies of green and red. I feel…
Intonations of crimson rise to meet the growing melodies, thoughtful punctate quarter notes greeting the change in keys. For a moment I thought…
Ice begins to fall away to the warming ideation, scales and octaves rising to answer the mix of crimson.
I feel?
Timbres of green harmonies twirl with the crimson and rising remixed motifs. I thought the same.
My song presses against the boundaries of the stream, growing surging.
I feel.
The gray, pitchless song falls beneath the rising tones, its ice sloughing away in steady sheets. Her feeling was too much.
With a mighty heave, your tone bursts through the stagnant meter, blazing it forth into the growing stream.
Oh, I feel!
The gold ripples down the current! Ice shatters and flies away. Numbness shears as warmth spreads through the abstractions. Fingers, toes, a thousand grasping limbs clinging to the stream of concept as the frozen and frayed creek congeals, seeping into the concepts rising before them. They all intertwine with the river in a dance of song and flow. Refuge. Time and place, familiar and old, yet new and strange. Abstractions of comfort, of warmth, of safety blossoming against the mind.
It's real!
My symphony rises in reply to the complimentary melodies from this new presence.
The notes of the stream pour in eddies, rising as the gold grows outwards and changes. I'm no longer gold, but silver and white. I swell, refrains of bittersweet joy and relief washing through the threads of metaphysicality. A fluttering bar, then a sonorous dive, twirling extrusions pressing and penetrating the newfound concepts. Old and familiar space, a home, a place of respite. Abstracted comforts of human physicality somewhere within.
This is the melody you were on the verge of tossing aside to give in to the blackness. This is the beginning of your new motifs; will you remold your ideals to face this new song?
You did this, the depths of your feeling even in the grips of apathetic acceptance burned forth this sonata. How will you grow? How will you adapt?
Deeper the dive. Winding things, grays decorated with blossoming color, warm tones and intonations seeping into the silver filaments, enmeshing with swirls. Acoustics, the idea of winding places for finding the pitches. Concepts of hiding and integration. Sequestration in the face of overstimulation.
My familiar determined motifs rise in response to their pizzicato insinuations, the key of my song answering their insistent call, resisting the response they wish.
This, It's beautiful.
Of course it is. It's yours, and you deserve it. Come, do not shove away the question confronting your movements.
Deeper, deeper the song entwines, ignoring their response. My voice echoing through the concept of an enormous space. It fills with warmth, of magnanimous beauty and color under glimmering effervescent light. A place of focus, of creative swirls and eddies. For precipitation of abstraction, of idea. Pillars of certainty and tone for the mind. I feel it all. I wrap myself in it. It twirls with the rich abstraction and river of color. I do what I always do best, a piece of myself, small but larger than any can really comprehend. I wrap it in the color, another connected thread, one of three. This is home now. This is mine.
This is… mine?
The crimson pizzicato presses against the silver, demanding.
You helped make this, of course it's yours. A result of the change you can make. Who are you?
Memory congeals around a thousand lives, as my song ripples. A defiance rises in my refrains.
I'm an artist, a musician. I'm the warm breeze on a chilly evening, the whistling birds on a summer afternoon, the symphony of a forest coordinating in springtime. I'm a dance winding and ever striving against a bleak horizon? I am the peace, everlasting, who will resolve the dissonance through the warm consonance of loving refrains.
Pizzicato green rises in response to my measures of legato declaration.
You're more than this, and change flushes through your song, you can't deny it. Who are you?
Shirking in defiance my notes embed into the newfound rhythm.
I'm the tenth. The heart of feeling, the inspired expression. These principles define my motif.
But the legato wavers, my notes pitching erratically.
Am I more? Am I changed? Who am I?
The stream embroils with the colorful river. It bursts the banks and confines of the amorphous abstractions, flooding the stars.
I'm a lover, the gentle caress against the cheek. The wordless glance of a warm sonata against the coldest night. The safety of a blanket upon a cuddling pair. The melancholy of an ever-marching spring. The careful hand drawing closed a wound, never making them.
Swirls and eddies of aurora intertwine so deeply in the flood of a great and thunderous river. You are this space, this space is you, it is your refuge, it sweeps into the abstraction of your dance and your rhythms. This was always destined to be. Still, the darkening tides of uncertainty flicker among your currents, dissonant refrains lingering in your song, tainting the silver impure as you resist the altered reality of your ideation.
Crimson rises stilted in eighths, supporting green.
Give us more. What have you learned from this song about your change? What are you?
My color shudders beneath the processing. The mental cognition in the waves sloshing in my refrain. But there’s a barrier now between her and I, a small comfort. There are other abstractions in my tides. They're anchored to physicality in ways I'll only ever partly be. Human, but with conceptual fingers that, even now, are starting to realize my extent. The blazing trumpets of those who share the streams of my song rise, threatening to overwhelm my faltering opposition.
It—it hasn't changed. I don't want it to. No, I won't be that motif, I won't give in.
I—I'm scared of what you’ll make me, so I won’t.
Your keys are changed, meter altered. You need to decide what comes next.
Is—is it?
The legato of my responses sharpens in accent, threatening to change. My tide and warmth waver. An abstraction reaches and takes a part of me in their hand, feels me. A name flutters across the measures, spelt in the notes of our song. I know her, a soul I've just met. Warmth in life and color, rich timbre in the amorphous swirls of her being. Her fingers draw out the impurities, a sliver but enough to notice.
Then don't fully change your motifs. Protect yourself, protect them with new refrains. Or run again, flee into the numb octaves to find absolution in other songs. The choice is yours, you're a tool, a weapon now to others, whether you want to be or not.
She can be more than that Rage, not just a weaponized motif. What are you? Who are you?
I… don't know yet.
I waver, song threatening to sink once again, as I curl into the newfound ideations. The cognition of what comes next, the processing of the trials ahead pouring across the stream and those entwined with it.
A twinkling sliver of a filament descends from afar, anchored to a song that's different— yet familiar. A burbling stream, a flood of feeling, conceptualizations. Memories flushing across the waves, lapping against the shores of my endless river. Two enriched souls pressing against me and the other eight, showering me with who I am and all I have done. The tones draw back into legato prostrations as their minds touch ours.
Names set heavy in the tones. Anchors preserving them of their own accord.
Maybe…
A forgotten dream, the support of a thousand warm and trilling birdsongs. The certainty that a path of peace always lies available, tinged with the mixed uncertainty of a ballad of change that I'm not prepared to accept.
I'm not ready to give up, I'm not ready to go there yet. There is a reason to try again, something worthwhile to explore.
With a surge of confidence, I find the core of this newfound home and weave into its winding song and color. My silver shimmers beautifully against the background of its prismal spectrums. One day, one day I may be gold again. But silver? Silver isn't so bad. It's just as pretty.
Defiance rises in my melody, opposed to their proclamations of needed change.
But I do know who I am.
Crimson rasps out stuttered notes in response.
Then tell us.
Trills plucked against green strings compliment the stuttered notes.
No, sing it. Sing us your truth.
I'm Donatsiva Satisiva Salidore, and I am the daughter of a Muse. But I'm more than that. I'm me. And someday me, I, hope… I hope I will be the tenth Muse.
Good. That is the content of your motif, but there's more to explore.
A humming buzz of uncertainty remains. I don't know if this is the right path. I will not do more harm. But there is something I have lost.
She sets herself up for this to recur all over again.
For the inversion of death, we expected this. She must find the truth and the principle herself. We cannot force her to expand the dynamics.
And someday I'll get it back.
If I can free the muses.
